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One of the residents answered the door and was forced to the ground at gunpoint as the men ransacked the apartment, investigators said.

"He grabbed me by the throat. He took me a little further into the living room and pushed me down and said, 'Don't move. Just stay down,'" UCF student Nour Skargee, 22, said. "They didn't realize my girlfriend was in her room and thank God she was in her room. I yelled, 'Hey, grab the gun.'"

The second victim, Sable Nehme, ran to her bedroom, retrieved her gun and pointed it at the culprits, deputies said.

"I quickly closed my door and locked it to get some extra time to get the gun," Nehme said. "He immediately, when he saw the gun, turned right back around, darted out and both of them fled the apartment."

One of the men dropped their gun, which ended up being a pellet gun.

"If we didn't have a gun, it would have been game over. They were bigger than me, bigger than both of us," Skargee said. "We had no way of stopping them. The gun was the one thing that made them run."

Deputies said they arrived at the apartment a short time later and used K-9s and a helicopter to search for the men, but could not locate them.